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THE IMMINENT DEATH OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT  
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Linda Greenhouse
August 25, 2025
The New York Times
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_ White people are depicted as victims of discrimination;.white South
Africans are invited as refugees; the president demands a museum
designed to tell the African American story must tell a happy tale.
The voting rights law may not see a 61st birthday _

Illustration by Jordan Bohannon / New York Times (Source photographs
by Jeff Kowalsky, Chip Somodevilla, Garen Meguerian and Bettmann/Getty
Images),

 

Questions about the Voting Rights Act’s constitutionality have long
been hanging in the air at the Supreme Court. But it was only this
month, in an order
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a Louisiana redistricting case
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that the justices placed the issue squarely on their docket.

Now that they have done so, with argument scheduled for Oct. 15, there
is little doubt that what remains of the 1965 law after its
evisceration in the Shelby County case
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seriously weakened, if not repudiated in its entirety by the time the
court’s next term is over.

My point here is not to join the chorus predicting that tragic
outcome. Rather, I’d like to pose a question: How did we get to this
point? How can it be that a law enacted to eradicate racial
discrimination in electoral opportunity, a crowning achievement of the
civil rights era, may fall 60 years later to the argument that the law
itself has come to be seen in some powerful quarters as an engine of
racial discrimination?

Might the explanation for the law’s perilous state be that it has
simply outlasted its usefulness, that the conditions that led Congress
to enact it no longer exist sufficiently to justify the continual
judicial scrutiny it imposes on state mapmakers? That was at the heart
of the argument that Chief Justice John Roberts made in the Shelby
County case, in which the court disabled the section of the law
requiring that states with a history of voting discrimination obtain
federal approval before making changes in their election laws.
“Things have changed dramatically” in the South, the chief justice
declared in his majority opinion, freeing those states from the reach
of the law’s Section 5.

It was also the argument that Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to
embrace two years ago, when he reluctantly concurred with a decision
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required Alabama to draw a second congressional district with a Black
majority. That case, like the Louisiana case, concerned the act’s
Section 2, which seeks to ensure that members of all groups have an
equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

The argument that the Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness is
easily refuted by facts on the ground. The County Commission of
Fayette County, Tenn., recently settled
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Voting Rights Act suit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that
challenged the county’s electoral system as racially discriminatory
in violation of Section 2 and the Constitution. Despite a Black
population in the county of more than 25 percent, the 19-member
commission has no nonwhite members. The Legal Defense Fund dismissed
its lawsuit after the commission drew a new districting plan with
three majority-Black districts.

I will avoid getting into the weeds of the Louisiana congressional
districting case, the one now before the court, without doubt the most
complicated voting rights case I have ever encountered. Briefly,
Louisiana v. Callais has its origins in an earlier case, a 2023 Fifth
Circuit decision that required the state to create a second
majority-Black congressional district. (A third of Louisiana’s
population is Black and the state has six congressional districts.) A
political struggle ensued over how to carve out a second district
while protecting the districts of two leading Republican members of
Congress, Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise.

The question the justices were asked to decide in the Callais case
during the last term was whether the lines the State Legislature
ultimately drew properly balanced race and politics. That is a
perennial Section 2 question: The court’s precedents hold that while
race must be taken into account when racially discriminatory
districting is alleged, racial considerations may not predominate over
other districting factors. The court heard the case in March but was
unable to decide it by the time the term ended in June. Any argued
case that remains undecided when a Supreme Court term ends requires a
new argument in the next term, a move that is considered routine.

But there was nothing routine about the order
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rehear the case that the court issued on June 27. Justice Clarence
Thomas dissented in a six-page opinion chastising his colleagues for
avoiding what he insisted was the real issue in the case, the
constitutionality of Section 2 itself. “For over three decades, I
have called for ‘a systematic reassessment of our interpretation of
Section 2,’” he wrote.

I have to underscore the extraordinary nature of Justice Thomas’s
dissent; in my decades of following the Supreme Court, I have never
seen a dissent from a reargument order. It was clear that the justices
had not simply run out of time to decide a complex case. They had come
to a long-deferred moment of truth: whether to finally accept Justice
Thomas’s frontal challenge or whether to continue to deflect it.

What is unfolding in an eerie way is a replay of a Voting Rights Act
drama that took place early in Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, years
before the current conservative supermajority coalesced. In 2009, the
court took up a case from Texas that challenged the constitutionality
of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, which required federal
preapproval for election law changes in states with a history of
discrimination. In an opinion by the chief justice, the court
sidelined the issue and decided the case,
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Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, on narrow grounds.
Only Justice Thomas objected. It was time, he said, to declare that
Section 5 exceeded Congress’s power and “can no longer be
justified.” His opinion sounded discordant and drew little
attention. Four years later, he was vindicated in the Shelby County
decision.

In the Alabama redistricting case two years ago, the case that drew
Justice Kavanaugh’s warning about time running out on Section 2,
Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion hewed carefully to the
facts of Alabama’s behavior. He explained in detail how the lower
court, in finding that the state needed to provide a second
majority-Black congressional district, had done nothing more than
properly follow Supreme Court precedent. Given the chief justice’s
well-known hostility to Section 2, dating back to his early years as a
lawyer in the Reagan administration, when the scope of the provision
was the subject of an intense political battle, his opinion took many
people, including me, by surprise.

Rereading the case now, it seems to me that he recited the court’s
precedents without embracing or endorsing them. What jumps out,
rather, is Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion, describing Section 2
as “hijacking the districting process to pursue a goal that has no
legitimate claim under our constitutional system: the proportional
allocation of political power on the basis of race.” It seems
possible, if not likely, that just as the Northwest Austin case served
as a prelude to Shelby County, so might the Alabama case, Allen v.
Milligan, be the prelude to the final dismemberment of the Voting
Rights Act.

To return to my question of how we reached this point: The Louisiana
case should be seen in a context bigger than the law and history of
voting rights. The early debate in which the young John Roberts took
an active part was about whether Congress, in amending Section 2 so
that it would not require actual proof of intentional discrimination,
was building into the law a requirement of racial proportionality. He
feared that it did, as he explained in a December 1981 memo
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his boss, Attorney General William French Smith: “Violations of
Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote.

The amendment passed after a leading Republican senator, Bob Dole,
introduced language that explicitly disavowed proportionality as a
goal. Nonetheless, the concern about whether the amended Section 2
anchored into the law a kind of racial entitlement, as so vividly
described by Justice Thomas, has not only lingered but also grown as
the country has retreated from the concerns that fueled the civil
rights movement.

Now it is white people who are depicted as the victims of
discrimination in many quarters, including the White House. When white
South Africans are invited to enter the United States as refugees
while actual refugees are remitted to their fates, and when the
president demands that a museum designed to tell the African American
story must tell a happier tale, can it really be a surprise that a
60-year-old voting rights law may not live to see its 61st birthday?

And so the court will take the Voting Rights Act’s measure, and a
decision will emerge that will gratify some people and underscore for
others how the country’s history is being flipped upside down. But
we cheat ourselves if we think of Louisiana v. Callais as only, or
even principally, a Supreme Court story. It’s the story of the
United States in this time. If the court has lost its mooring, it will
take the rest of us with it.

_[LINDA GREENHOUSE, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported
on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.]_

* Voting Rights Act
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* voting rights
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* Racism
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* discrimination
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* racial discrimination
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* Inequality
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* voter suppression
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* Gerrymandering
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* stolen elections
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* 2026 Midterms
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* Civil Rights
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* civil rights movement
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* Martin Luther King
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* MLK
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* Supreme Court
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* SCOTUS
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* Congress
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